Kim Fu

Sometimes, in my fantasies, I just disappear. Not in any way that I could—I don’t get in our car and drive away, I don’t follow a stranger into a club bathroom, I don’t abandon my children in the grocery store. I sing a grand finale song-and-dance number, the audience hidden past the footlights. The timpani drum rolls, deep but buoyant, as ten thousand sequins sewn by hand glitter across my corseted bodice and mermaid skirt, as we belt out goodbyes the night before the theater becomes a parking lot. I journey through the stars, fingers trailing through cosmic dust, the unfeeling desolation of space. I sink through a fizzing, golden ocean, bubbles drifting past, gently dissolving my skin. I lie on clean, crisp sheets in a comfortable set of pajamas, buttons and drawstring, as a reassuring weight bears down on both of my shoulders and forces them apart, spreads and flattens my body out like dough, thinner and thinner, into a dun-colored sheet of pastry, into a single-layer matrix of atoms, and finally into the infinitely small that is indistinguishable from nothingness.